European tech: Which way to the exits?

Max Niederhofer recently published this chart showing European exits. As you can see there’s been impressive growth in sub $100m exits, but the story with larger M&A exits and IPOs is less compelling. As I wrote last week our ecosystem is making great progress, but clearly, if we are to keep growing then at some point we need to see an increase in large exits.

The good news is that we can reconcile the facts that we have an increasing number of great companies with the fact that the number of large exits isn’t going up: great companies are staying private for longer. Witness mega rounds by companies like Transferwise and Deliveroo that in years gone past would have had to IPO to raise that kind of cash or, as was more often the case, sell to a larger company that could finance their growth.

This ‘staying private longer’ phenomenon isn’t just a European thing. In the US companies are raising amounts of capital previously only possible through IPO with much greater frequency than they are here. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing is debatable (private companies have less scrutiny and therefore lower costs, but arguably the scrutiny makes them more disciplined) but the important point here is that it’s skewing the exit data. That said, if LPs are to keep making new commitments to fund, they need to get cash back soon, so this trend can’t continue forever.